In search of greatness

In search of greatness (1981)

Trip to Vegas (1970)

July 11, 1980

Merrill find the small black kitten in the parking lot of Two Guys in Garfield brought the memory back about the two black cats Louise and I inherited in Las Vegas that last time we were there.

We didn’t even have a home.

We had hitched up from Phoenix with all our possessions on our backs, and the single thought of finding Gil – who we’d learned had picked up and moved there from our last seeing him in Phoenix.

Gil, a plump man that looked more like a grocery store clerk than a drug dealer, had taken us in when we passed through Phoenix a year earlier on our way back to Denver and – we had hoped to Alaska, and again on the way back when Alaska turned to be out of reach.

But the year had taken its toll – on us as well as we were to learn on Gil.

We had no wheels this time, and had hitched to Phoenix from L.A., and when we found Gil gone (the person pointed us to Las Vegas), we hitched from Phoenix to Las Vegas, with the last stretch on the wings of a high flying gasoline truck on a roller coaster of a road that looped this way and that, up and down, and around in what was supposed to be a north/south highway, after the madman behind the wheel picked us up half frozen from an overnight in the desert. We had unpacked a large white blanket with the hopes of attracting a ride in the dark after having spent hours staring up at the sky full of stars.

I remember seeing my first shooting star that night as it streaked across the sky overhead, and then others, a regular light show we kept mistaking for omens that someone would eventually stop and pick us up, some truck or van would pull over and let us in.

We never expected the gasoline truck to pull over or for the grinning face of its driver to look out and say, “well, what are you waiting for? Get in.”

And so we did.

“Thanks,” I said, once we had settled onto the front seat with him. “It was getting pretty cold out there.”

The driver grinned. He was a round man and big, fattened around his middle on greasy food from highway diners. But he was as warm as sand and a cheerful as a rising sun at dawn.

“Yep,” he said.  “It gets mighty chilly in these parts after dusk, and the sand cools so quick as to have you think its snow by moon light.”

He laughed. His bellow filled the whole cab.

“Where are you headed?” he asked.

We told him Las Vegas and he chuckled again.

“Going there like those other folks to make your fortune?” he asked.

We laughed and told him, no.

“We’re trying to find a friend,” Louise said.

The truck had started moving again and her dog, Midnight (a black terrier she had gotten in LA) bounced on her lap as the truck hit a bump. She sat on the hump of the transmission.

“Most folks I meet on the road travel this way to get rich,” the driver said. “They clutch green in their fists, misers keeping their money safe.”

He laughed again, a bellow that again filled the cab.

“Then they come back along the same road, thumbs stuck out, heads down, eyes staring at the ground as if searching for pennies, looking plum tuckered out, and without any green,” he said.

He fell silent as the desert glowed outside with the first touch of dawn. Clumps of grass appeared like fingers pointed towards the sun, and hills rolled northing heading towards the place the map said a dam existed.

I lit a cigarette and closed my eyes, listening to the dog scratch and the heavy breath of the driver exhaling in a near sigh.

I didn’t dare tell him how our fortune had been made and lost already, how our riches had come from New Jersey and not Las Vegas, and had dribbled away in LA like the receding waves of Santa Monica.

I said nothing, and yet, I got a feeling he already knew or guessed.

This may be why he started to talk. The words came out slowly, hesitantly, as if he had to dig each one up like a deeply buried sand crab which he let wiggle before letting it go.

“I know you,” he said. “Oh not you in particular, but a thousand faces just like yours, all wearing the same strangled look, like a medal or a bleeding heart. I’ve done this here run for eight years, and the LA to Denver run for ten years before that. I’ve seen your kind walking the sides of highways like lost sheep, with your eyes sunken and your thumbs hanging out. I guess maybe I looked like that myself once – lost.”

He lapsed into an uneasy silence as if he’d wanted to say more, but wasn’t sure we would listen. Louise nodded out on my shoulder with the dog’s big eyes turning to look at me and then at the driver, head down on its two front paws.

I petted him, and then I glanced out the side window at the short streets and the red sandy rock now sprouting up like some new kind of plant, a plant unlabeled by science, never classified in any books.

I guess that’s what I felt most inside of me, the lack of classification, a lack of importance. School never taught me who I was, just what other things were. The teachers made a point of stressing hard, core facts like what Washington or Jefferson did. They told us that two plus two added up to four. But they never told us how Washington hated water, or that Jefferson hated Hamilton, or that two plus two doesn’t put a meal on a table or a buck in my pocket.

But you had to have money before you could count it, and count it, I did.

I counted every bill I had taken from that safe back east, glancing over my shoulder the whole time, terrified that my uncles would discover me.

“You know, kid,” the driver suddenly spoke again. “I spent a long time running to every bar and every bitch from here to Needles and it didn’t do me any good. You goat find a place and stick to it – even if it’s a hole. Maybe we all have to settle down soon or later. Some folks settle in a home with a nice lawn and a station wagon, other settle for nothing, taking cheap jobs and women until they die.”

Again, he paused and I found myself staring at him, drawn to what he was saying like a fly to fly paper.

“Where do you come from, Marty?” I asked, suddenly curious about the man and what he had settled for.

The road twisted in front of us and he swung the wheel in silence with only the hum of tires growling beneath the truck like some partly tamed beast waiting for a chance to spring away.

Marty chuckled, raising Midnight’s ears. The man glanced at me his warm blue eyes, thanking me for a chance to speak and help slay his own ghosts.

He said he was born, raised and died in a little dust bowl of a town called Simon’s Ridge, ten miles north of Needles, and a million years away from anything else. It was a ghost town with living ghosts, desert rats and sorry old men who spent their lives in the town’s main attraction, the Golden Bear Tavern, telling tales that had died fifty years earlier but with a sense of undeserved importance. Even the town’s name had come from a doubtful legend, involving someone who had killed thirteen Indians and six cows in an epic adventure.

Marty had seen all of them come to the small town from other places like LA, where nobody wanted them to settle in the small town until they passed away. Some were even losers from Las Vegas looking to hide out until they found another dollar to go back or a razor to cut their wrists.

“They would steal the dollar if they could,” Marty said. “Or beg for one, promising to pay you back ten fold when they came into their own.”

The town also attracted every dusty stranger and horny cowboy from a hundred miles around, drunken but with just enough cash to pay for an hour upstairs above the bar with Marty’s mother.

“For a long time, I didn’t get it,” Marty mumbled. “When I finally did, I lit out for LA. I was 15, and found work loading trucks.

The problems came later: drinking, women, and fights that led him to confrontations with the police.

Marty shifted gears as the road wound around in the direction of Boulder Dam. The landscape changed into ridges and valleys, all carved out in red stone and short shrubs popping out of sandy soil.

I ached for the sight of a single tree – and evergreen that might break up the bleak landscape pale gravel.

Marty went on with his tale, but I only half listened. I kept trying to make sense of what we had done, seeking some logic to why we had left LA in search of Gil, mapping out the first trip in my mind when we’d first met him on our way to Denver.

We had stumbled into Phoenix with about five grand left from the original bundle of numbers money I had looted from my uncle’s safe in New Jersey, and left Phoenix with only four, not realizing the loss until we’d reached Albuquerque where I’d had a chance to count it all out on top of a dresser in a cheap motel.

We’d been ripped off of some of the money I had ripped off, and I recalled leaving the bag open slightly in Gil’s place while we – me, Louise and Dan went out on the town looking for LSD to take.

And here, I had thought they were just so kind to us, taking us in as they had, and feeding us, and seeing us off again with broad smiles – when the whole time they had plans of their own to escape Phoenix, and used their stolen cash to make the move after we had gone.

I shuddered. The sleeping Louise stirred on my shoulder but did not wake. Midnight shifted, snorted and gave me a dirty look.

Now, we were flying back into Gil’s arms, this time with only twenty dollars to our name. We were hoping to make a withdrawal from the money deposited in Gil’s wallet. After all, it was the least they could do.

I kept thinking of Gil’s wife, a quiet, but clear-eyed woman, always smartly dressed for her job as a civilian secretary working for the Phoenix police – a perfect cover for her husband who sold small amounts of drugs to pay the rent.

The truck roared down the final winding hill towards the dam. Marty’s hands shifted gears with the agility of a circus performer, rarely slowing down the truck even as the worst of curves, sending me into a quiet panic as I pondered what would happen if we overturned with all of the gas in the back.

But my thoughts kept drifting back to Phoenix, and how we had wanted to press on, after having spent one night in Phoenix, sleeping in the back of the van, and how Gil and his wife had convinced us to stay over for a few days.

“You can always leave in the morning,” Gil’s wife had said sweetly, but the tone felt wrong, like a Sweet Tart, pleasant at first, only to turn sour later. But I never suspected anything, even when the police surrounded our van in the parking lot of the Taco Bell the night before we were scheduled to leave.

“You’ll be going to jail for a long, long time,” the undercover cop said, a shit-eating grin on his face, coffee-stained teeth glinting with the flashing police car lights.

Someone had tipped them that we were carrying drugs. But the police cruiser lights slowly fell away when after their search they found nothing except our growling dog, Midnight, and one pot seed at the bottom of a butt filled ashtray.

I never suspected Girl or his wife until later.

As the winding column of the river and the dam appeared, I realized that we had a lot to collect here, to make up for a year of being over our heads in poverty, barefooted and jobless on Hollywood Boulevard.

And then, I caught up with Marty’s stream of talk and realized that what he had come up to also fit me.

“You just can’t ever get even,” he was saying. “You try and try but you just can’t do it.”

And we both sat still in this ever moving tank of gas as the giant concrete arms of the dam welcomed two more losers to the edge of Nevada, welcoming two more into the flock.

Louise sniffled and stirred, and eventually wok, her eyes red as they clung to the edges of sleep.

Midnight greeted her with an excited bark, as if he could read our immediate future, and could see what we could not, perhaps even foreseeing the two black cats we would pick up – the only fortune we would actually get out of coming here.

I thought all this ten full years later as I stared down into the cardboard box Merrill had acquired to house her new found parking lot kitten, it stretching up, claws scratching as if to climb out, desperate and empty, hungry, just the way I felt, but hungry for something more than just food or fame, hungry for some satisfaction I had yet to achieve, and perhaps never would.

Puff piece

Saturday, November 01, 2014

The Star-Ledger ran a puff piece on Asbury Park just prior to an election of no confidence in the current administration – and included Madam Marie’s as a lure for the upscale population city father’s hope will repopulate the one-time working class resort.

This has always been a sale pitch designed to make the place attractive to “a better class” of people, and it seems the media is going along with it – most likely for the advertising dollars.

This pitch comes at a time when the place is filled with vacant lots and a shortage of off-Boardwalk eateries in a town that is currently known for its music, its gay hotel and a funky way of life serving as bait in a game that will later become bait and switch once the upscale people move in and there is no room for “artists.”

Indeed, the one off Boardwalk sports bar/eatery is so overcrowded that after five on some nights you have to wait an hour or more to get seated with prospective upscale people spilling out onto the street like street gangs of old.

One owner of a somewhat funky place on Cookman complained about the city’s plans to upscale the community, noting that it would only draw in people who already have homes elsewhere and merely want summer residences.

“They won’t invest anything in the community,” she said. “They won’t care about the schools or the services. They will come here in the summer and then leave.”

The puff piece in the newspaper – like several others in more local papers – clearly was placed to help influence an election in which voters want to throw the city father’s out because of their persistent misguided vision of what Asbury Park is supposed to become, and put in officials that will look to create a more legitimate city rather than a playground for the wealthy and perhaps void the monopoly of the developer who currently gobbles up property to build it.

Al Bum’s Halloween

Oct. 31, 1980

The ghosts haunt; they fly by night and come to scream and howl; they bang on things; they rattle their chains.

There is a thrill in the air, as well as a chill, shivering down children’s spines as they stumble down concrete paths invading door after door with masks on and baskets, and an unquenchable thirst for excitement.

It’s the same now as it was when I was a boy when me and Dave darted out from dark places formed by the crisscross of street lamps.

I dressed up at a bum one year, something Leonard and Craig would never let me live down once they caught me on the street. Both of them signed my grammar school year book “to my favor Al-bum.”

For a while it was funny, but it eventually wore thin, and for a time I came to hate them, but even that faded, and it never stopped me from dressing up when Halloween came around.

Dave always dressed up as a ghost; I dressed up as a hobo. And we continued to invade houses in our neighborhood with a paper bags until we started to hear the whispers behind us as the doors closed saying, “They’re a little old to be trick-or-treating.”

Even then we laughed, and developed another strategy, attaching ourselves to groups of kids so we didn’t stand out as much. They appreciated having larger kids around because by that time, other larger kids didn’t dress up at all, but slunk around in shadows waiting for groups of kids to come along so they could grab the bags from the smaller kids and run away. Dave and I scared them off, only a few times getting into a fight that attracted so much attention, these kids fled fearing someone would call the police.

We kept our costumes simple – not like today where they cost a fortune to buy.

We figured if we wanted to rot our teeth with candy, we weren’t going to go broke doing it.

Tonight is Halloween. I’ll be going off with my girlfriend to see my best friend’s band play, although I’ll still look out at the kids on the sidewalks, and wonder just how safe they are – this being a much more violent time than when I grew up, and with far fewer people like me and Dave to dress up as ghost and bum to fend them off.  We hear all the talk about razors in apples and people with guns, and I wonder if perhaps I would trade my hobo outfit for one that resembled a cop’s. Maybe I won’t think too much about it, especially with the crew that hangs around the band. I’m sure most of them will dress up, and I’m even tempted to do so myself, certain that I can find a ragged pair of jeans and some old coal dust from down in the basement.

I’ll probably get drunk anyway.

But I know my costume is my memory, which swirls around me, wrapping my present in its arms, keeping me whole wherever I am, filled with the echoes of Craig and Leonard shouting, “Hey, Al Bum!”

Mischief night

Oct. 30, 1980

It’s the day before Halloween, a day that meant real trouble when I was young – not for me, but for every single car window within blocks of my house I could lay a piece of soap on.

We called it goosey night; elsewhere people called it mischief night.

But over the years, I’ve seen the tradition fade from the somewhat maniacal passion we put into the evening’s festivities.

Halloween itself was supposed to have been the wild night, the night before All Soul’s Day.

But society found ways to clean up the wild holiday so that eventually a new night evolved in which we could let out our wild spirits.

Yet in my travels, I found some places never expanded the transition, and the idea of a night for mischief seemed as alien as some of the characters that showed up at people’s doors begging for treats.

In Portland, mischief night was still Halloween, keeping with the tradition that ghosts and goblins let loose prior to All Soul’s Day, so that trick-or-treaters were often intermingled with mischief makers like me. But even at that it is tamer than what I’m used to back east, and only those from my part of the country recognize the difference, or are even aware that mischief night ought to be on a different night than Halloween.

People in the southwest seem to know nothing of this primitive habit, and look on me with shock and dismay when I mention it, asking why anyone would so such an uncivilized thing as that.

And to tell you the truth there is no way to explain the exhilaration I’ve felt fleeing down a dark street, staying in the shadows street lamps cannot illuminate to the pop, pop, pop of leftover fireworks and the raised voices of angry people trying to find out where we went so they could ring our necks.

Or the smug pleasure we felt walking to school the next day when we saw red-faced people scrubbing soap or wax off the windshields of their cars. Sometimes, a besmirched store display would go all the way into the Christmas season uncleaned, giving us a good laugh each time we passed knowing that those marks were ours.

We were leaving our mark on the world, getting our small piece of immortality.

Something people today seem not to understand, even though many of them grew up in the same place and time as I did.

Knowing all this, I’m still debating whether or not to move my car to some “safe” location, seeing myself red-faced in tomorrow’s cold scraping soap, wax or worse off my windshield.

When I was younger and on the other side, I saw it all as right and proper – and important ritual I had to do each year on this day.

I was telling people I existed, even if they didn’t know exactly who I was.

These days, I’m still trying to leave my mark, not with a bar of soap, but in other ways, and these days, I want people to know exactly who did it.

Still, I feel the urge to get some soap. If I do, I’ll start with my own car.

Museum to the Icon of Asbury Park

October 19, 2014

His face stares back at us through the window so that we might never forget who he is and what he’s done, this icon of Asbury Park to whom so much is attached – the fingers clinging to his shirt tails so that something can survive here when so much else has not.

This place is like a church with images of holiness we feel even though we are separated by class and time, having never met this savior from the streets, and likely never will, but rubbing shoulders with those who have, high priests of this new religion who lead us through the litany, a never ending passion play in which their god has not yet been crucified and perhaps may never, leaving this city – this place from which he sprung – to be sacrificed instead, while he tries real hard to keep his hands clean, a combined Pilot and Christ, over whom we rub our own hands and ponder out own guilt.

And when let into this new chapel of love, we look upon his apostles in their various poses, guitars instead of crosses, a saxophone, the notes of which we hear just by looking, and the highest of priests giving us a brief and sad tour of this Nazareth by the sea, and how like Jerusalem of old, awaits the invasion of Roman legions, and the desecration of the Philistines who will build their own chapels on the foundations of musical places of prayer, and will change money in their need to make this place over into something other than it was, with this one last holy place to testify to what went on before the walls of Jericho fell.

Luck and antiques brought us back to Cookman on Sunday to find the music museum open and a display of official E-Street Band and other photos as well as band photos from nearly every facet of Springsteen’s career.

We had passed the store front a number of times during previous trips, but it has always been closed, leaving us to peer in at unexplained memories. We came to this place on this day only because of a last minute reluctance to leave Asbury Park so soon – and as we always did during our visits to Cape May, we took one last stroll, hoping we might find some bit of magic we missed. In Cape May, this stroll usually allowed us to see dolphins or butterflies absent earlier in our visit.

Finding the museum open, we went in, and became drenched in nostalgia for a time, place and performances we had no living memory of. The museum was displaying photos taken by the official photographer of The Stone Pony – which included a number of pictures taken at Clemons’ night club in Red Bank.

The photographer was even on hand to talk about the history of these clubs and the history of Bruce.

I had seen the photographer earlier at The Stone Pony when the Jody Joseph Band had played along with students – as it turns out – from a school run out of this very museum.

I had a number of questions – one of which involved the physical look at The Stone Pony which seemed different from what I remembered during my visits in the 1970s.

And for good reason.

The place had changed hands several times, even owned by Dominic Santana, who I knew as the owner of Hardgrove Café in Jersey City. He apparently got overwhelmed running The Stone Pony and sold his interest to a developer who has since gobbled up nearly all the sacred music institutions in Asbury Park, either to knock down – as was done with the Fast Lane, Student Prince and other less noted places, or to use as a sales pitch for the condos destined to fill every square inch of what had once been a working man’s seaside amusement city in a monopoly city fathers granted because they were too inept to deal with the problems they were elected to solve.

The developer currently owns the Stone Pony, the Wonder Bar, and large chunks of the historic boardwalk. Because of the name recognition of the Pony and Wonder Bar, the developer has invested into upkeep on the buildings – including addition of a doggie outdoor area at the Wonder Bar where dog owners might get drunk while their dogs romp around.

At the Pony, the developer added a canopy to the front door, and raised what had once been a very leaky flat roof. None of these changes, however, guarantee the bar’s survival, but the developer will squeeze out of them all possible good will, after which they will likely also vanish, once public attention is turned elsewhere. One plan would move all such institutions up onto the boardwalk so as to make even more vacant land available for even more condos so that the city fathers can collect even more taxes and drive real estate prices so high working people can no longer afford to live in Asbury Park in an upscale version of the old song, “Another Pleasant Valley Sunday.”

This conversation with the photographer also dispelled a popular myth that Bruce had purchased The Stone Pony to save it – when Upstage Club still rots only a block from the museum.

The photos in the museum were well worth looking at, giving image to what I had only heard or read about, a physical reality to a world that once was but can never be again.

Dark morning

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

I hear the rain before I see it, this dark October morning, a week or so before my world converts again to Day Light savings, and I feel the rain before I hear it, a heaviness on my chest that stirs me out of sleep and my usual dreams of the deep sea. Like John Lennon, I am the son of a sailor – though it may be the only thing we have in common. I am also the grandson of a boat builder and so feel the tides rise and fall inside of me, sensing the change of seasons just before they arrive.

Drenching rain like this at this time of year always marks the real shift from the lingering warmth to the edge of bitter cold, a harsh fact of life I have come to accept if not quite welcome, since I need one to realize how special the other is, the cold to make me understand the tenderness of warmth.

And yet, my best moments near the sea do not come with bright sun and intense heat, but with the moody gray of heavy clouds and the lonely cry of seagulls bemoaning the change, as they begin their long search for food.

This is midweek, and so I will not see the sea for several days, yet already know a chill air will greet me, if not gray skies.

I ache to walk near the edge of the water, risking the cold kiss of the waves as they consume the sand near my feet – and like Madam Marie, trying to predict which one will come closest and if I will have time to escape the hissing touch of the water when it comes.

Here in the real world, everything is slick, the headlights illuminating dull pavement so that the streets do look as if paved with gold, wet now, but destined in a short time to grow slicker with ice, a risky proposition in a place where people do not handle adversity well.

In the dark of early morning, I feel the madness of the planet, and see people who have given up all civility in order to get somewhere ahead of everyone else, even if it isn’t worth getting there. The radio newscasters report collisions and crashes now instead of mere accidents, because they have ceased to be accidents at all, but the careless aftermath of careless acts of careless people I have to steer around, and like with the waves, predict how close they will come before making contact.

We are all invisible in the dark, shadowy shapes hutched over steering wheels, peering out into the dimness ahead, trying to get some place safely. I keep thinking of my father, who sailed through an atomic cloud as a seaman, and later died of cancer – and wonder if there was a connection, and if he felt the same sense of being lost as I do on mornings like this – and the same sense of impending change.

The attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 came in stark sunlight with extremely blue skies, and so I have come to dread sunlight, knowing that disaster can strike even when I can see for miles and miles the way I could that day. Perhaps it is because we assume we are safe when we can see all, and make no similar assumptions on dark mornings like this, when we are overly cautious and thus manage somehow managing to avoid being hit by the waves – the instincts of a son of a sailor more acute in foul weather, when the chill of the air gives warning.